The Snow Tiger / Night of Error

  ‘By God, you’re right,’ said Campbell. ‘We’ll get it out of Kane as soon as he’s served his purpose.’

  Geordie grunted. ‘We’re going into the Pacific,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll get it out of Schouten. At all events, we’ll be at the root of it.’

  THREE

  It was nearly three months before we got away. You can’t begin a scientific expedition as though you were going on a picnic. There were a million things to do and we were kept busy on a sixteen hour day, seven days a week. The first thing I did was to hand in my resignation from the Institute. Old Jarvis didn’t take it too well, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it so he accepted the situation with reluctance. I wished I could have told him what I was doing but that was impossible.

  Geordie assiduously recruited his crew and soon they began to turn up. He had kept on four of his own lads and had of course taken on Kane in place of one of the men he let go. Of the other six that he added, all were faces that I hadn’t seen since I had been a boy during the war, tagging around after my dad’s gang.

  Ian Lewis detached himself from his croft with alacrity and Geordie made him first mate; he’d had years under sail and was almost as good as a professional. Ex-corporal Taffy Morgan came along; one night during the war he had killed six Germans with a commando knife in utter silence, earning himself the M.M. Danny Williams had also won the M.M., although I never found out what for since he was reticent about it. There was the burly bulk of Nick Dugan, an Irishman from the Free State. Bill Hunter turned up – he had made a name for himself as an underwater demolitions expert and was the only other regular sailing man among the team. And there was Jim Taylor, another explosives wizard – he had been very near my father when he was killed.

  They were now all into their forties, like Geordie, but seemed as tough as ever. Not one had lost his fitness and there wasn’t a paunch among the lot of them. Geordie said he could have recruited twenty-five but he’d picked the best of them, and I almost believed him. I was confident that if we ran into trouble we could handle it.

  Geordie was confident too, of welding them into a good sailing crew. What any of them lacked in knowledge they’d soon pick up and the enthusiasm was certainly there – although for the time being they knew nothing of the complications in which we were entangled. It was a straight research and survey trip to them all, including Kane, and any hints Geordie may have given his special team they kept strictly to themselves. As Campbell had predicted, Kane was sticking as close to us as a leech; Geordie had simply told him that there was a berth for him if he cared to cross the Atlantic with us, and Kane had jumped at the opportunity.

  Campbell had gone back to Canada. Before he left he had a long talk with me. ‘I told you I had a good intelligence service,’ he said. ‘Well, so have Suarez-Navarro. You’ll be watched and they’ll know everything you do as soon as you do it, even apart from Kane’s spying. It can’t be helped. We’re deadlocked and we know it. So do they. It’s a case of we know that they know that we know, and so on. It’s a bastard of a position to be in.’

  ‘It’s like a game with perfect information – chess, for example. It’s the man who can manoeuvre best who wins.’

  ‘Not quite. Both sides have imperfect information,’ he corrected me patiently. ‘We don’t know how much they really know. They might have the exact location of the nodules we’re after, and only have to drop a dredge to prove their case, but perhaps they’re behind us in planning and need to stop us somehow first. On the other hand, they don’t know how much we know. Which is precious little. Maybe as much as, or no more than them. Tricky, isn’t it?’

  ‘It would take a logician to sort it out. Talking of knowing, have you made any progress with the diary?’

  Campbell snorted. ‘I gave it to a top-flight cipher expert and he’s having his troubles. He says it isn’t so much the peculiar shorthand as the sloppy way in which it’s written. But he says he can crack it, given time. What I wish I knew was how Suarez-Navarro got on to this in the first place?’

  My own thoughts were that Mark, cheated out of Campbell’s involvement – I guessed that’s how he would see Campbell’s loss, only in terms of his own disappointment – had approached them himself. But I still didn’t know enough about how Campbell viewed Mark to say so. It hung between us, a touchy subject that we both carefully avoided.

  So he went off to Canada to further his own progress, we speeded up ours as much as possible, and it was with great relief that I heard Geordie announce one day that we were at last ready for sea. All he needed to know was where to head for.

  I said, ‘Do you know the Blake Plateau?’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s just off the coast of Carolina. We’ll test the winch and the rest of our gear there, and it’s a long enough voyage for you to pull your crew together. I don’t want to go into the Pacific to find that anything doesn’t work for some reason or other. If there’s anything wrong we can get it fixed in Panama – they’ve got good engineering shops there.’

  ‘Okay. But why the Blake Plateau?’

  ‘There are nodules there. I’ve always wanted a closer look at Atlantic nodules.’

  ‘Is there any place where there aren’t any?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘They won’t form where there’s heavy sedimentation, so that cuts out most of the Atlantic – but the Blake Plateau is scoured by the Gulf Stream and nodules do form. But they’re poor quality, not like the ones in the Pacific.’

  ‘How deep?’

  ‘Not more than three thousand feet – deep enough to test the winch.’

  ‘Right, boy. Let’s go and scoop up some poor quality wealth from the bottom of the sea. We should be away in a few days now.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ I said. I was in fact boiling with impatience to be gone.

  II

  We made a fair and untroubled crossing of the Atlantic. Geordie and Ian, together with the regular crew members, soon got the others into a good working pattern and spirits ran high. Kane, we were pleased to notice, fitted in well and seemed as willing and above-board as the others. Knowing that they were all curious as to our purpose I gave occasional rather deliberately boring lectures on oceanography, touching on a number of possible research subjects so that the matter of manganese nodules got lost in the general subject. Only two people retained an interest in what I had to say, and to them, in semi-private, I spoke at greater length about our quarry. One was Geordie, of course, and the other, not too surprisingly and in fact to my satisfaction, was Bill Hunter. Already our diving expert, his interest and involvement might well be crucial.

  One afternoon they both joined me in the laboratory, at my request, to learn a little more. A quiet word from Geordie to Ian made sure that we weren’t going to be interrupted.

  Geordie picked up a nodule which I’d cut in half – I had brought a few on board to help my explanation along.

  He pointed to the white central core.

  ‘I suppose you’ll tell me again that it’s a shark’s tooth in the middle of this rock. You never did get around to explaining that, did you?’

  I smiled and held up the stone. ‘That’s right, it is.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No I’m not – it happens often. You see, a shark dies and its body drifts down; the flesh rots or is eaten, the bones dissolve – what bones a shark has, it’s cartilage really – and by the time anything reaches the very bottom there’s nothing left but the teeth. They are made of sodium triphosphate and insoluble in water. There are probably millions of them on any ocean bottom.’

  I opened a small box. ‘Look here,’ I said and gave him a larger white bone. It was as big as the palm of his hand and curiously convoluted.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a whale’s earbone,’ said Bill, looking over his shoulder. ‘I’ve seem ‘em before.’

  ‘Right, Bill. Also made of sodium triphosphate. We sometimes find them at the core of larger n
odules – but more often it’s a shark’s tooth and most frequently a bit of clay.’

  ‘So the manganese sticks to the tooth. How long does it take to make a nodule?’ Geordie asked.

  ‘Estimates vary from one millimetre each thousand years to one millimetre each million years. One chap estimated that it worked out to one layer of atoms a day – which makes it one of the slowest chemical reactions known. But I have my own ideas about that.’

  They both stared at me. ‘Do you mean that if you find a nodule with a half-diameter of ten millimetres formed round a tooth that the shark lived ten million years ago? Were there sharks then?’ Geordie asked in fascination.

  ‘Oh yes, the shark is one of our oldest inhabitants.’

  We talked a little more and then I dropped it. They had a lot to learn yet and it came best in small doses. And there was plenty of time for talk on this voyage. We headed south-south-west to cut through the Bahamas and the approach to the Windward Passage. Once in the Passage we kept as clear as possible of Cuba – once we came across an American destroyer on patrol, which did us the courtesy of dipping her flag, to which we reciprocated. Then there was the long leg across the Caribbean to Colon and the entrance to the Panama Canal.

  By then we had done our testing. There were minor problems, no more than teething troubles, and generally I was happy with the way things were going. Stopping to dredge a little, trying out the winch and working out on-station routines, was an interesting change from what we had been doing and everyone enjoyed it, and we remained lucky with the weather. I got some nodules up but there was a lot of other material, enough to cloud the issue for everyone but Geordie. Among the debris of ooze, red clay and deposits we found enough shark’s teeth and whale’s earbone to give everyone on board a handful of souvenirs.

  Both Geordie and Bill were becoming more and more interested in the nodules and wanted to know more about them, so I arranged for another lab. session with them one day. I’d been assaying, partly to keep my hand in and partly to check on the readiness of my equipment for the real thing.

  ‘How did the Atlantic nodules turn out?’ Geordie asked. On the whole he did the talking – Bill watched, listened and absorbed.

  ‘Same old low quality stuff that’s always pulled out in the Atlantic,’ I said. ‘Low manganese, low iron and hardly anything else except contaminants, clay and suchlike. That’s the trouble in the Atlantic; there’s too much sediment even on the Blake Plateau.’

  ‘Why does manganese behave this way – why does it lump together?’

  I laughed. ‘You want me to give you a course of physical chemistry right now? All right, I’ll explain it as simply as I can. Do you know what a colloid is?’

  Two headshakes.

  ‘Look. If you put a teaspoon of sugar into water you get a sugar solution – that is, the sugar breaks down right to the molecular level and mixes intimately with the water. In other words, it dissolves. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Now what if you have a substance that won’t dissolve in water but is divided into very fine particles, much smaller than can be seen in a regular microscope, and each particle is floating in the water? That’s a colloid. I could whip you up a colloid which looks like a clear liquid, but it would be full of very small particles.’

  ‘I see the difference,’ Geordie said.

  ‘All right. Now, for reasons that I won’t go into now, all colloidal particles must carry an electric charge. These charges make the colloidal particles of manganese dioxide clump together in larger and larger units. They also tend to be attracted to any electrically conductive surfaces such as a shark’s tooth or a bit of clay. Hence the nodules.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Bill slowly, ‘that having broken down a long time before, the manganese is trying to get together again?’

  ‘Pretty well just that, yes.’

  ‘Where does the manganese come from in the first place – when it starts clumping, that is?’

  ‘From the rivers, from underground volcanic fissures, from the rocks of the sea bottom. Fellows, the sea out there is a big chemical broth. In certain localized conditions the sea becomes alkaline and the manganese in the rocks leaches out and dissolves in the water …’

  ‘You said it doesn’t dissolve.’

  ‘Pure metallic manganese will dissolve as long as the conditions are right, and that’s what chemists call a “reducing atmosphere”. Just believe me, Geordie. Currents carry the dissolved manganese into “oxidizing atmospheres” where the water is more acid. The manganese combines with oxygen to form manganese dioxide which is insoluble and so forms a colloid – and then the process goes on as I’ve described.’

  He thought about that. ‘What about the copper and nickel and cobalt and stuff that’s in the nodules?’

  ‘How does the milk get into the coconut?’

  We all laughed, taking some of the schoolroom air out of the lab. ‘Well, all these metals have certain affinities for each other. If you look at the table of elements you’ll find they’re grouped closely together by weight – from manganese, number twenty-five, to copper, number twenty-nine. What happens is that as the colloidal particles grow bigger they scavenge the other metals – entrap them. Of course, this is happening over a pretty long period of time.’

  ‘Say a hundred million years or so,’ said Geordie ironically.

  ‘Ah well, that’s the orthodox view.’

  ‘You think it can happen faster than that?’

  ‘I think it could happen fast,’ I said slowly. ‘Given the right conditions, though just what these conditions would be I’m not sure. Someone else doing research thought so too, though I haven’t been able to follow his reasoning. And I have seen peculiarities that indicate rapid growth. Anyway that’s one of the objects of this trip – to find out.’

  What I didn’t say in Bill’s hearing was that the ‘somebody’ was Mark, nor that the peculiarities I had seen were contained in the prize nodule left from his collection. And there was something else I didn’t talk about; the peculiarities that led to high-cobalt assay. I was beginning to grope towards a theory of nodule formation which, though still vague, might ease the way ahead. I was becoming anxious to know how Campbell’s cipher expert had made out in translating Mark’s diary.

  III

  Ten days after leaving the Blake Plateau we warped into the dockside at Panama. At last we were in the Pacific, all my goals a step nearer. Campbell was waiting for us, jumped spryly aboard and shook hands with me and Geordie, waving genially at the rest of the crew.

  ‘You made a good fast trip,’ he said.

  ‘Not so bad,’ said Geordie complacently.

  Campbell looked about the Esmerelda and at the crew who were busy stowing sail and clearing the decks. ‘So this is your crew of cut-throats and desperadoes,’ he said. He was in a jocular mood – a mercurial man. ‘I hope we won’t need them.’ He took my arm and walked me along the dock, amused at my wobbling land-legs.

  ‘I’ve booked you into my hotel for a night or so; there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a last taste of luxury before the big job. Geordie too, if he wants it. I’ll expect you both to dinner – you can’t miss the hotel, it’s the Colombo, right on the main street. You can tell me all about the trip then. Meantime I want to talk to you in private, now.’ He steered me into one of the waterfront bars that always seem to be handy, and I sat down thankfully in front of a large glass of cold beer.

  Campbell wasted no time. He produced a biggish envelope from his jacket. ‘I had photostats made of the diary pages,’ he said. ‘The original’s in a bank vault in Montreal. You don’t mind? You’ll get it back one day.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said.

  He shook out the contents of the envelope. ‘I got the translation done. My guy said it was a bastard of a job – he only hopes he’s got the scientific bits right.’

  ‘We’ll soon find out.’ I was stiff with eagerness.

  Campbell handed me a neatly bound booklet wh
ich I flicked through. ‘That’s the stat of the original diary. This one’s the translation. There are reproductions of all the drawings at the back. The whole thing looks screwy to me – it had better make sense to you or this whole thing is a bust already.’ His good humour had already evaporated, but I was getting used to his changes of mood.

  I glanced through it all. ‘This is going to be a long job,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to be able to make any snap judgements here and now; I’ll look at this lot this afternoon, in the hotel room. Right now I want to go back to Esmerelda and sort out procedures with Geordie, pack my gear and go and take a shower and a clean-up.’

  If he was disappointed he didn’t show it – clearly what I said made sense. And so it was not until I was lying, damp and half-naked in the blessedly cool hotel room a couple of hours later that I finally opened the envelope. The translation of the cipher was pretty well complete except for a few gaps here and there, but it didn’t improve matters as much as I’d hoped. The thing was disappointingly written in a kind of telegraphese which didn’t make for easy reading. It was a true diary and evidently covered the last few months of Mark’s life, from about the time he left the IGY, although there were few dates and no place names written in clear at all.

  I wondered if he’d always kept such a diary, and decided that he must have done so – diary-keeping is a habit as hard to break as to develop. As to where the earlier volumes had got to, there was no guessing, nor did I think they would have helped me much anyway. This was the vital period.

  It was, on the whole, an ordinary enough diary; there were references to shore leave, films seen, people mentioned by initials only in the irritating way that people have when confiding to themselves, and all the other trivia of a man’s life, all in brusque lack of detail. Mark had kept a brief record of his amours which wasn’t pleasant to read, but otherwise it was fairly uninteresting on the surface.